Today, there is great interest in the personalization and customization of images as a way to add value to documents. This is especially true in transactional and promotional markets, but is gaining traction in more image intensive markets such as photo finishing. Several technologies currently exist to personalize images such as XMPie, DirectSmile, and AlphaPictures, for example.
A fundamental challenge is to estimate the geometry of a surface upon which text is to be rendered. Existing applications commonly resolve the problem by a manual approach, where a 2-dimensional text grid is overlayed on the image and locally warped in X and Y coordinates by the user to appear to fit onto a 3-dimensional object surface. This interface, however, can be cumbersome to manipulate and does not provide a true 3-dimensional surface geometry. Accordingly, text placement is restricted to a fixed location and spatial footprint.
What are needed are convenient and easy-to-use systems and methods to insert personalized text into an image in a natural and less restrictive manner.